Untying the Mother Tongue Conference
Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Hélène Cixous

12//5

A beautiful, sonorous reading given by Hélène Cixous woven around her enduring linguistic and literary attachments from a childhood of multilingualism, where the languages spoken by her father, mother and grandmothers (French, German, English) connected her, dreamily, to the distant lands of her ancestors and their domesticated languages, creating, by extension, the personification of language as being an omi or a mama. “I multiply and divide myself in a multiplicity of languages, emotions come through in diverse language.” “Since omi is German, I am only a child of German”

Here are a few further notes from her reading:

“The heimat is never to be confused with nation. The heimat is a mixture of love and attachment, milk and tradition. The heimat is a retreat. And home, the more we return to it, the more we safeguard strength and power. Muttersprach. Language is mother, almost a more real mother than the other.”

“We must resist nationalism, it is a deceitful appropriation.” “The loss of language is the loss of those, and humanity, to connect to. Humanity is gained by learning language.”